[HOPE] 1. Anxious Yet Flourishing

This is the first episode in a new series called Hope and Direction in a Time of Crisis. These episodes will be excerpted from free webinars hosted by Paul Miller and conversation partners Jon Hori and Liz Voboril. To view upcoming webinars, visit seejesus.net/events.

"We're separated from this text by 2,000 years, but you can feel Paul's emotions. They are vivid. Emotions are a function of what it is to be human. It's kind of a human flourishing you're looking at. Human flourishing is not escaping or being pulled somehow above the emotions of life. Paul is completely embedded in love in the hearts of the Thessalonians. They are on his heart, so therefore he feels anxiety. It normalizes good anxiety."

"Anxiety is like anger. It is potentially sinful. But it's not inherently sinful. That's the simplest way to say it."

"We tend to put anxiety and human flourishing in two different buckets, as if they are enemies of one another. What dying and rising with Jesus does it mixes the buckets. It puts them together. In fact, it's anxiety, a life of stuff coming at you, that is the way you get to know Jesus. The things that are making me anxious are my door to knowing Jesus. And that's true human flourishing: being in Jesus."